Social Networks & the NEED for FEEDS

Currently, Sean is the VP of Business Development & Product Management at mSpoke, Inc. Sean also regularly contributes to the influential Read/WriteWeb blog and hosts the weekly podcast Read/WriteTalk. Once an aspiring programmer, Sean has found his niche as a new technology evangelist. Currently, this manifests itself in his passion for helping publishers revitalize their online content with mSpoke’s adaptive personalization solutions. Prior to co-founding mSpoke, Sean was a research fellow at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Industry Center and served on the Editorial Advisory Board and as a columnist for Information Week. He holds a B. S. in Computer Information Systems from Grove City College.

• Web site

Chris Messina arrived in San Francisco four years ago to begin volunteering for the Mozilla Foundation, as a leader of the Spread Firefox community marketing project. During his time with Mozilla, he helped raise over $220,000 in microdonations to put a two-page spread, which he also designed, into the New York Times helping to increase Firefox’s downloads to over 50 million in its first six months.

He went on to co-found web browser Flock and served as Director of Experience and Open Source Ambassador. Later, he co-founded Citizen Agency with Tara Hunt, and was named one of the Digital Utopians and People Who Populate Web 2.0 in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2006 after his work on WineCamp.

He has spoken at numerous conferences around the world and has been quoted in national publications such as The New York Times, Business Week, LA Times, MIT Technology Review and Wired. Chris is well-known in the Web 2.0, open source, and startup worlds for his community advocacy and work on open standards initiatives like microformats, OpenID and OAuth. He is a key leader of worldwide community efforts such as Coworking and BarCamp.

• Web site

Dave Morin is the Senior Platform Manager at Facebook, where he is responsible for the company’s platform strategy and further expanding the Facebook developer community. Dave joined Facebook from Apple, where he became the Manger of Creation & Collaboration technologies after his tenure as Manager of Student Marketing. Prior to Apple, Dave founded the company Viadi a technology and marketing company focused on building strong brand experiences using the power of the Internet. Dave received a bachelor’s degree in economics and business from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Adam Nash is currently Senior Director of Product at LinkedIn, the largest global professional network. A seasoned technology executive and general manager, Adam has experience across engineering, product management, product strategy, and venture capital with a focus on identifying business opportunities around emerging technologies and leading teams to design great products to address them.

Prior to joining LinkedIn, Adam held executive and technical roles at eBay, Atlas Ventures, Preview Systems, and Apple. He received both BS and MS degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University, as well as an MBA from Harvard Business School.

• Web site

David Recordon is Open Platforms Tech Lead for Six Apart, the largest independent blogging company in the world. Recordon has played a pivotal role in the development and popularization of key social media technologies such as OpenID. In 2005, Recordon collaborated with Brad Fitzpatrick in the original development of OpenID, which has since become the most popular decentralized single-sign-on protocol in the history of the web. During a year and a half at VeriSign, Recordon played an active role in refining and evangelizing OpenID, bringing it from an experimental technology to one that’s been endorsed by major companies ranging from AOL to Microsoft, and implemented for over 120 million identities on the web. Recordon’s history with open source software and open standards stretches back to the beginning of his career, when as a sophomore in high school he volunteered his time to lead an open source message board project with over forty members worldwide. This interest led to his co-founding of a message board hosting provider that still services tens of thousands of users around the world, and that he has since sold. Recordon was recently recognized by Google and O’Reilly as the recipient of a 2007 Open Source Award for his efforts with OpenID and is the youngest recipient in the history of the award.

• Web site

Kevin Chou is the CEO of Watercooler, the world’s largest fan community online. Kevin has led the company from founding to over twenty million registered fans across the Watercooler social media platform.

Watercooler enables television and sports fans to connect with other fans inside their favorite social networks.

Prior to Watercooler, Kevin spent several years at the global venture capital firm Canaan Partners investing in digital media, consumer internet services, and online advertising companies. Kevin took part in funding 10 companies during his tenure at Canaan Partners, deploying part of the firm’s $2.3 billion of capital.

Earlier in Kevin’s career, he advised public technology companies on M&A and corporate finance as part of Deutsche Bank’s investment banking arm in San Francisco.

Kevin holds a BS from UC Berkeley in Business Administration, graduating magma cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.

• Web site